Converting furfural residue wastes to carbon materials for high performance supercapacitor

Sustainable development based on the value-added utilization of furfural residues (FRs) is an effective way to achieve a profitable circular economy. This comprehensive work highlights the potential of FRs as precursor to prepare porous carbons for high performance supercapacitors (SCs). To improve the electrochemical performance of FR-based carbon materials, a facile route based on methanol pretreatment coupled with pre-carbonization and followed KOH activation is proposed. More defects could be obtained after methanol treatment, which is incline to optimize textural structure. The activated methanol treated FR-based carbon materials (AFRMs) possess high specific surface area (1753.5 m2 g-1), large pore volume (0.85 cm3 g-1), interconnected micro/mesoporous structure, which endow the AFRMs with good elec-trochemical performance in half-cell (326.1 F g-1 at 0.1 A g-1, 189.4 F g-1 at 50 A g-1 in 6 mol L-1 KOH). The constructed symmetric SCs based on KOH, KOH-K3Fe(CN)6 and KOH-KI electrolyte deliver energy density up to 8.9, 9.9 and 10.6 Wh kg -1 with a capacitance retention of over 86% after 10,000 cycles. Furthermore, the self-discharge can be restrained by the addition of K3Fe(CN)6 and KI in KOH electrolyte. This study provides an effective approach for high-valued utilization of FR waste.(c) 2021 Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communi-cations Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study highlights the potential of using furfural residues to prepare high-performance supercapacitors, and proposes a facile route to improve their electrochemical performance. The activated methanol treated FR-based carbon materials exhibit excellent electrochemical performance and cycling stability, making them promising for constructing high energy density symmetric supercapacitors.